the usual personifications by women, of portions of sea rather than of land) it may be seen by inspecting the map, that the Arabian Gulf exhibits a strong resemblance of a female figure; her headdress being composed of the two small inlets at the north end of the gulf towards the isthmus of Suez; her face being at Haura in Arabia, her neck at Jambo, her breast just above Jedda; the outline of her robe extending through Serrain, Ghezan, and Lohia; her leg at Moka, and her ankle at the straits of Bab el Mandel; the whole as copied from the map in Fig. 166. As to the extract above offered from Harris's voyages, if it be compared with the following short passage (and its context) in the mouth of Andromache, 6 Il. 410, εμοι δε τε κέρδιον ειν Σεν αφαμαρτηση χθονα δυμέναι, I think it will appear satisfactorily that Homer had the same natural phænomenon in view as Père Averil; and as I understand him, he gives a much more minute and detailed account of it... For in the following lines, 6 Il. 399, .. ୪ Η οι επειτ' ήντησ' αμα δ' αμφιπολος κιεν αυτή Παιδ' επι κολπον εχεσ' αταλάφρονα νηπιον αυτως Εκτορίδην αγαπητον αλίγχιον αςέρι καλω and in these, 467, Αψ δ' ο παις προς κολπον εύζωνοιο τιθήνης I take Andromache's nurse (τιθήνη) to represent VOL. V. K the country of Arabia, which, either as being surrounded by the sea or being crossed by the tropic, may warrant the epithets αμφιπολος and εύζωνοιο, usually applied to her. As drawn in Fig. 167, she does not comprize the whole of Arabia, though her general form agrees with the shape of that country; but the dotted line at her waist, marks the position of the tropical circle, and her face which looks westward up the Persian Gulf is correctly copied from the outline of the Arabian coast at the straits of Moçandon. Astyanax the son of Hector and Andromache, represents the Persian Gulf itself, which, as copied from the map and drawn in character in Fig. 168, resembles an infant in his swaddling-cloaths, and as it has also the shape of a crescent like that of the moon, that may have given occasion for the comparison made of him, asɛgi naλw in one of the quotations above. His name, Astyanax, may be derived from the river Astan, which, after the Euphrates, Hector, is the principal river that falls into the Persian Gulf. These statements being premised, it will not be difficult to understand the very beautiful fable of the parting of Hector and Andromache, at the close of the 6th Iliad: the Euphrates (like the Nile) is subject to extensive inundations about the time of the sun's coming to the tropic of Cancer, during which the waters of the Persian Gulf, through the medium of that river are widely spread over the interior of Asiatic Turkey; and as from hence the union of Hector and Andromache might well be fabled to take place, so the cessation of those inundations upon the sun's declining from the tropic, may be conceived to have given rise to the fable of their parting. Αψ δ' ο παις προς κολπον εύζωνοιο τιθήνης The meaning of the highly natural and most beau |